Ben Foster wanted to be experience what it was to be Lance Armstrong in ‘The Program’

The Program, director Stephen
Frears's latest film, will likely go down as the most in-depth, uncanny
depiction of the rise and fall of Lance Armstrong to date. Credit goes to actor
Ben Foster, who went to insane lengths to become Lance, taking on intense
months of training, riding the most treacherous legs of the Tour de France
while filming, dramatically fluctuating his weight by 30 pounds to portray
every point of his career, from the top of the podium to the battle with
cancer, and even going on his own regimen of performance-enhancing drugs
"to more deeply understand what this world was about," Foster says
between screenings at the Zurich Film Festival. He did everything but speak
with the film's subject man-to-man. "In so many words, Lance Armstrong was
not interested in talking with me. I couldn't blame him at all. I wouldn't have
wanted to talk with me either."

Did playing
Lance Armstrong give you a newfound appreciation for cycling?

I
appreciate the rigor it demands, but I have not been on a bicycle since we
finished shooting because I've been pretty deeply traumatized. I hadn't cycled
before and only had a limited amount of time to train. Simply said it was an
aggressive training process.

What drew
you to the project?

The
interest for me was working with Stephen Frears. He's made so many kinds of
movies. To my eyes I can't find a signature style of his. Lance, on the other
hand, is very recognizable. To get the opportunity to explore a subject that I
knew very little about while working with a master filmmaker was a rare
opportunity.

Do you think
people in the States are still hurt by Armstrong's story?

I do.
From what I've heard and who I've talked to about it in North America, people
get very emotional. They're upset about the subject. In Europe it seems that
they've been able to process what Lance did, while in the U.S., we haven't done
that yet. So far, I don't think Lance Armstrong has apologized in a way that is
palatable to us.

What are
your own thoughts on how his scandal played out?

My
job is all about defending the people that I play. I had to rationalize what he
did. Early on Stephen would half joke that he was going to call the film
"The Stupid American." I thought that wasn't too generous a title. We
had different views and I hope that actually translates in the movie, that
there are always two sides to the story. It's a little more complicated than
saying he's a liar and a doper. He's a man who raised a half billion dollars
for cancer research. He won the Tour de France seven times in a row and he
wasn't the only one doping, he was just better at it. He did everything better.
He moved the needle in all aspects of the sport while also doing a lot of good.
His bullying was bullying people who were threatening his empire, and that
empire was saving lives. I think calling him just a gangster is ignorant.

What did you
read and watch of his appearances to prepare?

I
watched everything. He's so recognizable. Sitting that long on a bicycle, it's
going to even change the way that you walk. What made his story so accessible
was the way that he communicated. His rage was always pretty close to the
surface. I was interested in both the persona and the man behind the persona.
The loneliness that must occur with people like that who are at the top of
their field. To answer your question, the joy of the job is to ask questions
and then consider them in both an emotional and physical way. You find that he
had certain mantras, speaking about the will to survive, the way to better
yourself. I imagine that he was a guy who looked around the room and thought, "Nobody
is working as hard as I am. Nobody is as determined."

Did you hear
any stories that proved particularly insightful to who Lance Armstrong was as a
person?

This
isn't a biofilm. You hear anecdotal stories. I would have liked to have partied
with Lance. He sounds like he was a lot of fun. He went hard. I'd be talking
out of turn if I talked about some of the stories, but I was most touched by
the work and attention he did give the cancer community. He'd call up people
that he didn't know who were struggling with the disease and just talk to them
for two hours. He would talk about the hope that you need to get better. His
visits to the hospitals were very moving, my aunt started a foundation called
Conquer Cancer"in Boston, Massachusetts. It's a subject that's important
to a lot of people, and though right now he may be out of favor, it's important
to return to the fact that he did put in the time. He did raise that money. It
wasn't just a cancer shield. He tried to better the planet.

What
kind of preparation did you do to re-create Armstrong's appearance and cycling?

I was in very good
hands. I rode with people who had rode with Lance in the peloton during
the Tour de France. They
did their best to teach me how to look like he did. We had a computer program
that had analyzed his position on the bike. Then we did the best to match my
look and stats with his. I was also working with his nutritionist and his
mechanic during his time on the Postal team. I worked with a wellness doctor
who helped create a program of performance-enhancing drugs that I could do as
safely as possible. I did that because I felt it was important for me to more
deeply understand what this world was all about.

Cobbles are
one of the more challenging aspects of the Tour. How did you face up with
those?

We shot them in Belgium in the rain and mud. Insurance was not there on set
that day, which was for the best because if you go down, you may break a knee,
and then the film's not happening. But keeping the handlebars loose in the
hand, and keeping your balance is the trick behind those. I really loved riding
the cobbles though. It's brutal but fun.

The
weight-changes were really impressive. How did you lose that much?

That
was all me. That was a very grumpy me. I knew neither was going to last too
long but I had about two weeks to go from one to the other. There wasn't the
money to support a more gentle change. To start, I was lifting a lot of
weights, then I had two weeks to basically cannibalize my body. Shooting in
sequence would have been ideal, but we didn't have that luxury this go around.
Weee! [Laughs.]

The first
shot, of you at Alpe, d'Huez, is incredible. How did it feel to be there?

It
was fucking scary. We are there shooting in the French Alps and I haven't told
anybody about this but I have terrible vertigo. Terrible vertigo. I've dealt
with it. I've done bungee jumping. I've done wirework, but it's a paralyzing
fear. David Millar was one of our champions who made sure the details of the
cycling were correct in the film. He was handling the opening shot. It was
being filmed on a four-wheeler, with a steadicam on it. It was able to tilt and
weave with us. They said, "Just head down the mountain." Then they
were asking me to speed up! I was riding the brakes for the first few minutes,
but finally I had this moment where I started passing the camera. The
competition part of your brain starts to take over and you want to tear the
mountain apart. It was those moments where I started to understand the drug of
the sport. The first bit of intensity in my face, though, was not, "I'm
going to win." It was, "I'm going to die."

What do you
think that you got out of this experience that will be useful in the rest of
your career?

Very
little scares me now. Once you ride down a mountain like that and don't die,
it's hard to be scared anymore.